


Burning Waters

by OneThousandCuts



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate World State, Blood and Injury, Dark Mermaid AU, Everything's better down where it's wetter...or not., F/M, I hope you like eels, Taking advantage of local canon folklore, Underage drinking depending on what Wutai's laws are?, not heavy drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:49:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22779745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneThousandCuts/pseuds/OneThousandCuts
Summary: It is said that the appearance of the 'Sefi', Leviathan's apocryphal nemesis, heralds the end of the world. Tifa thinks she might have met him before, and is on a voyage to find out the truth.Written for FFVII Rare Pair Week 2020
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Sephiroth
Comments: 21
Kudos: 37





	1. The Unconscious Encounter

The sun was dipping below a placid, flat ocean, casting a golden path that led to the docks. The SS Godo was nearly loaded, soon to follow the light-trail into the horizon.

Sitting on her luggage, Tifa ran her fingers impulsively over the top edge of the scar that had mysteriously appeared across her chest when she was fifteen, recalling the nightmare that had left it there. She remembered how she'd fallen asleep one evening while reading an ancient Wutai legend about a creature called the 'Sefi'. It had been a thrilling, fantastical, and completely impossible tale about a beast--a demon or destroyer deity, nemesis to Leviathan--whose awakening was a portent of the end of the world.

She'd enjoyed herself until she'd dreamed that the sky was falling, burning up the planet at the wicked naga-man’s behest.

Because it had turned into something more than just her imagination; something much worse than a vision. Although it had been years, it still replayed in her mind like it was last night: Forced to balance on a flimsy, half-shattered raft for her only protection from the churning deep, he'd swiftly captured her. All it had taken was one misstep, a slip into the sea, and he'd dragged her under by one hand, inspecting her like a fresh catch. Manic rage danced in his aquamarine eyes while his silvery mane billowed out from behind him. His upper torso was that of a fit man; the lower a sleek, black eel's tail with a serrated, razor-sharp back edge. He was deadly. He _was death._

His lips twitched up into an awful smirk, and with a powerful turn and flip, he'd released and cut her, diving down into the trench below to consume the world's heart.

Tifa didn't know how she knew that's what he was doing. All she could do was watch helplessly as dark crimson clouds of her own blood billowed up from her body to meld with fire-kissed waters; as the liquid poured into her lungs.

And then she'd woken up, gagging and bleeding through her nightshirt.

For the rest of that week, she'd remained bedridden, nursing over a hundred stitches and recovering from the blood loss. More than the physical scar, that night had cursed her with a dirty secret. Papa was convinced the townsfolk would believe she'd been marked by angry spirits of the dead who'd failed to pass through Mount Nibel if they knew.

The official story was that she'd taken ill, and it had rendered her permanently weak against the heat.

Concealing the scar during the next few summers had proven infuriating. Any time she had outside, she’d spent confined to her barricaded back yard, learning to fight with Zangan, while papa chased away Cloud, the withdrawn neighbor boy who'd started asking after her. Everyone else's kids--including her friends--knew enough to keep their distance and their heads down when it was too warm out. Her father was the mayor, after all. Except for the Strifes, all the right people knew, and none of the wrong ones. 

Isolated when she couldn't dress for cold weather, she'd also honed her piano skills, and began reciting poetry. Loudly. To annoy papa as much as possible, in hopes that he'd give up on trying to hide and control everything.

When that didn't work, she finally ran away. She’d been the older end of seventeen at the time. Maybe papa meant well, but he was wrong--dead wrong--and she had to get out. No one should have to live like that.

Now, at twenty years old and a little more than two years far from her hometown, she was eking out a living as sea-faring barmaid and bard. Times were tough and the audiences not always savory, but the freedom was sweet: There was no need to hide her scar from anyone who didn't believe in Nibelheim's superstitions (nor did she try if one who did crossed her path), and she'd learned how to catch wind of every rumor that might give her another tale to tell.

Her last voyage had disembarked at Wutai, where the air offered sprinkled whispers and sighs about none other than her girlhood dream-state assailant. According to the local grape-vine, there had been some strange night-time lights and other disturbances in the waters over a trench off the northwestern coast. The Kisaragi family was sending an expedition, with their daughter Yuffie at the helm to investigate.

From what Tifa could make out, nobody really believed they'd find the Sefi--no one really believed _in_ the Sefi. Leviathan had job security, but entities destined to end the world were too inconvenient and silly to rate worship or fear, it seemed. Only demented elders on the verge of death had much to say about him, and that was usually gibberish.

Still, the ship would need entertainment, and she needed answers. So it was, after haggling a just barely unfair pay-rate from Yuffie, Tifa had her next gig, and here she was, waiting to sail out and see what she might find.

She wondered what the few sailors milling about hoped to do against a creature who could call down the stars if they were wrong about his non-existence. Then again, she was foolish enough to go with them, but she had to know: Was her encounter more like what people back home might have believed--a trapped spirit who'd failed to pass through Mount Nibel turned bad--or had she truly somehow rated the sadistic attentions of Wutai's disowned destroyer god?

And if she had, how? She was a nobody from the middle of nowhere, not only land-locked but surrounded by mountains. What could this legend possibly want with her?


	2. Shipwreck

Tifa quickly lined shot glasses down the galley's short counter. The evening supper and booze call had gone out on the SS Godo, summoning deck hands, a small group of opportunistic fishermen who'd paid an extortionate fee to board, navigators, the professors the Kisaragis had commissioned to study the phenomenon at the trench, and 'Captain' Yuffie herself.

"Rum, please," a short, stocky man with a receding hairline grunted politely.

"One rum, coming up," Tifa piped.

"A spicy rum," the younger boy after him said.

"Spicy? You look young for this stuff," Tifa hummed, "but I guess if you're old enough to risk sailing with these guys, a little spot won't hurt." She poured half the glass and passed it over.

He threw it back and made a lewd gesture when Yuffie sauntered up.

"Ugh, every time. Rum, rum, rum. Grossness," she snorted. "Also, Shake's not old enough. You just liquored up a punk kid who’ll either break something or pass out. But…if he breaks something valuable enough, they might kick him out of the pagoda…a little push here, an extra obstacle there…"

"And what will you be having, Captain?" Tifa prodded, interrupting Yuffie’s breakout scheming session.

"Wha—Captain? Oh, yeah. That's me. Plum sake, warm," she said, handing over a key. "Below the counter. Kisaragi reserve. We should polish it off, before I…urk…"

Tifa pushed the key back. "You're seasick."

"Look, if the thing I'm in moves, there's a one thousand percent chance I'm gonna at least think about retching, so just hand it over," Yuffie retorted. "Usually that ogre at the top of the pagoda does the sailing, but he's weird about this 'Sefi' thing, so it's on me."

With a raised brow, Tifa retrieved the key and gave Yuffie what she wanted. "Godo's worried about the Sefi?"

"He thinks there's a monster who lives out there, but the actual Sefi?" Yuffie laughed. "Only brain-dead geezers and people who spend too much time meditating at Da-Chao's peak where the air is thin buy into that."

Tifa poured a glass for herself. "What do these 'geezers' say?"

"Oh, you know. The world is corrupt, the Sefi's chosen a consort by now, and when they meet, the ocean's going to catch fire, dogs are going to birth magic pots, the sky's going to fall, Leviathan's going belly-up, blah, blah, blah. The end of Wutai is the end of everything. They've only been saying it as long as there's been old people," Yuffie rambled. "Sefi this, Demon of the Wutai trench that."

Tifa swallowed her drink hard; its fluid trail burned down her esophagus. "A-a consort?"

"'Cause the world needs to go out with a bang! Get it? Consort, bang…"

Forcing out a laugh, Tifa tucked away the bottle and locked the hidden cabinet. Now _she_ was nauseous. What if following this lead had been a mistake? Was it possible she was walking right into this creature's trap? What if slashing her up had been a lure all along? Because there was no way she could forget. No way she could stop thinking about it. It had changed how she lived and how everyone in back Nibelheim looked at her.

What if she really was putting the whole world in danger by being here?

No, no. That was ridiculous. She needed to calm down. No matter where she'd gone, Gaia was full of tales about ancient, unseen forces with mortal liaisons. It was the usual window dressing for those stories. Even back home, there was a coming of age fable mothers told their daughters about the Mountain Lech, a suave spirit who possessed young men and made them untrustworthy.

Tifa smiled sadly. It would have been nice if her mom had been around a little longer to tell her half-jokes about boys with demons in them, but she'd passed through Nibel or was just gone, whichever the case was, before she'd turned ten.

Then again, maybe it was just as well. Superstition had never done her any favors. She needed to remember that.

Looking back up at Yuffie, she beat a quick recovery from her momentary panic by wryly reciting:

 _"There was an odd lad from Mount Nibel_  
_His moves were quite slick but feeble_  
_Mother beat him with a stick_  
_When he whipped out his dick_  
_Her daughters no more to wheedle"_

Yuffied cackled. "What was _that_?"

Tifa covered her mouth, partially hiding an amused grin, grateful that Yuffie was that easily entertained. That easily distracted.

 _"There was a young woman from the East_  
_Whose puns were a terrible beast_  
_It could have been worse_  
_If she'd written the verse_  
_She hired help for that part at least"_

"Urk…okay, stop…Time for the fun part!" Yuffie choked, half dry-heaving.

"Yeah, let's do this," Tifa said, and made her way over to the piano in the far corner.

For the next hour she played, spinning old yarns from back home, or other places she'd seen in her travels. _The Jolly Green Maid of Mideel_ , a ditty about a boisterous and feather-discolored chocobo keeper, evoked whoops and howls, along with one giddy crow of, "Hey, I think I know that broad!".

To which Tifa thought, don’t we all? No one went to Mideel without meeting her, somehow. She was fairly sure scratching the birds’ heads was Mideel's exit fee at this point.

When everyone had calmed, she cooled off with _Longest Costa Night_ , a sad ballad about a woman jilted on her honeymoon who'd found a love in the sea and never returned.

_"And the tide, it rushes in to meet her  
_ _Wash away, wash away the scorn  
_ _The blistered hearts of yester-years_  
_One thousand cuts to the death,  
_ _One thousand leagues forlorn…"_

But for a few weeping eyes, a hush fell over the room, followed by a round of sober applause.

Tifa lifted her shaking fingers and balled them into sweaty palms. She fixed her eyes on the ivories, on the pedals at her feet. Her hair fell into her face, graciously hiding her tears from her audience. Her insides were fluttering, her heart was pounding in her head. This song always left her feeling a bit somber--the 'love' in the sea was implicitly death itself--but this was different. She felt different. She tried to think about what she might do, where she might go when this wild fish chase was done. Usually, she could dream up any number of interesting places she might revisit next, but before her was a wall she couldn’t see past. A sense of finality she couldn't place.

A sense that the road ahead, whether simply the one she was on now, or the only one she'd ever know, was fast coming to an end.

Then, something slammed into the ship. A shrill scraping noise tracked down the length of the outer hull.

A group of the more weather-worn looking sailors immediately sprinted up to the deck. "Miss Yuffie, we've got something!" one of them called down.

"Yeah, what is it?" she yelled, and disappeared up the stairs.

"It didn't breach, but something left a mighty gash on the starboard side," a gray-haired navigator said. "There's something down there, and I'm not guessing we quite have the firepower to take her."

Quietly, entranced, Tifa stood from her bench and walked after them. The night sky that greeted her was painted in aurora borealis; the ocean itself ethereally calm. Light reflecting off its surface gave it an almost oily sheen. There nothing to see; only the unmistakable sensation of a looming presence.

 _Something, someone_ was here, watching them. 

A jolt of pain seared its way across her chest, across the scar, and Tifa doubled over slightly, taken aback--it hadn't ached like that since the first few months of her recovery.

At that, the boat tilted sideways into the water, the port side lifting and holding itself aloft at an impossible angle. While she leaned into the slope, cleaning implements and other detritus rolled overboard. A couple of men clung desperately to the edge by the tips of their fingers.

Just as abruptly, it released, splashing back down and sending everyone tumbling across the deck.

"Urk…okay. Let's…let's go," Yuffie wheezed, and promptly vomited.

"Get all our gunners up here and turn us around! And Shake. Someone's got to clean that up," the old navigator commanded. "Damn thing's toying with us."

Tifa inhaled sharply and clung to a nearby flag mast to steady herself. Maybe it was just a hungry shark, or an as-yet undiscovered intelligent monster playing these head games.

But the hot, throbbing line running from her shoulder to her hip told her otherwise.

The thunderheads swirling in overhead where only seconds ago the heavens had been crisp and clear affirmed her fears. A single, deliberate red bolt struck the mast, bursting it into flames and breaking off the top. The suddenly-roiling waters tossed the boat, fast-spreading the small, spotty fires it rained down onto the deck into an uncontrolled conflagration.

And as she leapt between hot spots to go back down and warn the others, she caught a glimpse of a monstrous black tail flipping up from the waves.


	3. Drowned

Tifa came to lying face down on a plank of debris, completely drenched and slightly scorched. Water sloshed around her bare feet and below her knees, offending her scraped-up shins. Her fingertips were cold and pruned. One of her ears rang; the other was water-logged.

It had all happened too fast--the lightning assault on the ship had continued unabated, reigniting flames the crew had barely begun to extinguish and shearing slabs off the hull. She'd successfully evacuated everyone from below deck by then, and when it had become clear SS Good wasn’t going to be able to hobble back to shore, the passengers had escaped into the ocean, jumping for the lives.

That is, they'd avoided burning to death. They had not, however, escaped the unseen being that had started picking them off, dragging them under to drown at first. They were unable to evade the silver-haired naga-man with the bladed tail when he’d started circling them, corralling everyone together and bleeding them out simply by gliding by and pivoting a little too close.

Tifa let loose a small whine. The sight of Yuffie's head, clean-cut from the rest of her like a hunk of market deli meat, floating by with wide eyes and mouth ajar, had been seared into the fore of her mind. She retracted her hands and peeked up at them. They were wrinkled and her fingers were dotted with splinters, but otherwise spotless. The blood had dispersed enough that she was floating on just water again.

The Sefi was real. _He's real, and he’s probably still here, and he’s after me,_ she repeated to herself. She had found him; not some unusual monster; not an abnormally large fish.

Most of Wutai's comforting decision to believe he didn't exist hadn't saved them, or her. Tifa didn’t know what was going to become of her. Only she was left alive. She was alive because this person, this creature, whatever he was, wanted her that way. All because she'd read the wrong book and had the wrong dream when she was barely more than a kid.

Carefully rolling onto her back, the thought prompted her to glance down at her chest. The pain there had vanished, and a pulsating, blue-green glow had replaced the swollen inflammation. In fact, the tissue had actually spread, curling up around her neck and twisting down her left leg like a vine creeping beneath her skin. It was warm and a little itchy. Tifa lifted and flexed the afflicted limb, finding it fully functional.

It hadn’t disabled her yet, but the scar was doing _something_ to her. What, she couldn’t say.

She'd never gotten around to reading the part about the destroyer's consort that Yuffie had described. Most of what she remembered was about Leviathan's fall. When the Sefi was ready to end the world, Leviathan was to make one last appearance to fight him. Like all good kids' stories, it had portrayed Leviathan as victorious, but ended on a warning.

_"If the nemesis has found his passion, if the harbinger of ruin has appropriated from this world one who suits him, the end is assured,"_ Tifa read from memory, not that she'd made a point of memorizing it, but there it was anyway. It had been characteristically vague for a myth. Taking someone from the world could have just as easily meant killing the right person as it did selecting a mate.

Her anger flared. Her only crime had been in thinking he had fascinating story. Where was her say in all of this? She had absolutely not chosen him. Why should the world die for something so one-sided?

Even so, aware of how little choice she had, she zoned out, fixing her gaze on the still-swirling clouds. Small, non-threatening peals of thunder echoed far above, the sound she'd expect from a receding storm.

Perhaps if he found her catatonic, he'd lose interest. Just a plain, stone-cold statue of a woman, nothing to see. Numb and boring, so why bother? Better to turn tail, swim back into his lair and try again in another century or two for someone more capable of fulfilling his needs in a consort.

Tifa stayed that way for an indeterminate amount of time, out of her head or hiding inside. She almost fell asleep.

A rough, clawed hand curling gently around the palm she'd left to dangle in the water brought her back to herself. She kept her sights trained on the sky, but he surfaced to hover over her, and there was only him. Only him and those wild, inhuman green eyes that had picked her apart before cutting her down years ago, set in a visage too beauteous to belong to the natural world. Those eyes regarded her differently now, with something bordering on a softness—the closest they could come to that, at any rate.

He caressed the side of her face with his other, more human hand, and leaned into her, murmuring, "Do you remember me?"

She clenched her jaw and nodded. "Why me?" she ground out, or she meant to. Her voice quivered instead, betraying a fear that completely subsumed her rage. 

"You survived and still sought me. I'm in your verses; the last notion before you sleep returns to that night. Did you think I would not perceive," he lowered his head enough that their noses brushed, "that I would not feel the depth of that obsession?"

She winced beneath his touch, but more so beneath the truth of his words. His accusation unhinged something fragile in her.

It was true: She could have wandered her home continent, doing the same job, performing in safe venues on terra firma, but she’d always found a dock or a boat. It was always a cruise, or a wedding party, or even a dingy, half-broken-down supply freighter. There had been innumerable late, sleepless nights, staring across the sea until eventually, morbid curiosity had overtaken the terror.

Knowing why he'd visited her—someone so inconsequential—only to wound her had become more important than the memory itself. The easy, dissatisfying answer was that it had been for sport. Space and time seemed like no object, so why not? But she'd done well to convince herself it wasn't like that: Of all the stories she'd gathered, she'd intentionally avoided his legend until Wutai. Some craven, lonely part of her mind had made up an alternate version of him, one who'd magically whisk away the world and all the troubles she'd seen in her journeys. All those people she'd never quite connected with or pains she harbored unresolved because the next boat was always leaving.

Because she'd always chosen to keep moving, pretending not to be searching for him when her eyes were constantly peeled.

Maybe her own sorrow had made her think of the Sefi differently than the horror warned of in Wutai's mythos, or perhaps, in that first encounter, he'd infected her mind somehow. Either way, there was no going back.

Tifa relaxed her back against her shard of a raft and made a decision. Planting her free hand on the back of his wet and surprisingly silky head, she drew herself up and closed the space between them.

His lips were cold, but his mouth soft and sweet, entangling with hers; his teeth nipping at her lower lip while she squeezed the beastly hand still locked around hers. His claws bit slightly into the back of her palm, but she relished the small pains. A coy inkling of those same sharp points, scratching up the side of her thigh passed through her mind. She wanted to feel it, him, real and in person, whether that meant love, a perverse flavor of lust, or outright annihilation.

They were merely differing ways down the same road at this point.

Dark laughter rumbled in his chest. He parted from the kiss and pulled her down into the water with him, plunging them into the depths.

As her carried her deeper down, she once again saw him as she had in her dream five years ago--a beautiful man and a vicious, unreal sea monster in one. Tifa was certain that he intended to kill her this go around. There would be no awakening to the safety of home this time. He'd forged the connection he needed, and now he was going to use its power to fulfill all the terrible prophecies about him.

Tifa covered her face and thought back on her life while the strength to hold her breath slowly faded. She’d been so foolish. She should have stayed home in Nibelheim, finished her last year of school, maybe gone on to teach music. Her papa would have been pleased, and she'd still be doing something she'd loved. They could have made amends over her isolation, talked about ways to reel in some of the more harmful local superstitions. She could have thanked that weird blond kid next door for thinking of her. Peace had been within her reach if only she’d waited a little longer, but she’d sacrificed it to impatience and wanderlust.

To obsession.

Sefi's smooth, onyx tail encircled her legs, its bladed edge pointed outward. With her back to his chest, her pried her hands from her eyes.

Tifa squirmed and thrashed in his hold. Icy panic set in, as the pressure building in her diaphragm was becoming too much to hold. She needed to breathe. Seconds of her life were wasting away, and when she could no longer help herself, it would be over.

Around her neck, along her chest, and down her leg, the scar prickled and throbbed, intensifying her tortured struggle not to inhale.

Dead ahead, through dizzy, blurred vision she caught the shape of a giant sea serpent, crossing existential planes to fight for the world. Its scales were made of luminescent cobalt; its eyes of sapphire. Vibrant magic and living energies flowed along with its approach: Leviathan, Wutai's guardian deity, swimming in elegant twists--the only creature capable of defeating the one who'd had taken her captive. 

Except, she'd willingly forfeited that hope already.

Leviathan halted yards out from them, hesitating. It glared at her, radiating trepidation where there had previously been potent composure and purpose. 

Pitiless, Sefi clawed an agonizing trail across her scar's original length, breaking it open.

A muffled scream ripped through Tifa's throat, forcing her mouth open, and the ocean rushed into her. She convulsed, and her fresh wound projected a burst of light, instantly reducing Leviathan to a raw rope of energy. Into her it flowed with the waters, writhing and coursing through the scar tissue as blood through an artery, healing her and growing new offshoots down and around her legs.

She wasn't dying-- _she was changing._

Tifa gulped down another liquid breath. Her insides tingled, and she felt the water expel through newly-formed, slits at the base of her neck.

Where Sefi had entrapped her legs in his serpentine hold, they were now intimately conjoined in a twist of black and violet. Millions of overlapping scales had replaced the soft skin of her legs, allowing her close contact with his sharper edges.

Echoes of old knowledge reverberated throughout her mind. She understood that this part of the legend, before unknown to her, had rated as high blasphemy to close adherents of Leviathan: That the enemy, if agreeably bound to a mate (impossible for such a callous soul, the ancients would say), would cause her to consume their god and take on its form, and that their combined will would tear the world asunder and reshape it as they pleased. Alone, Sefi could call down stars, crush the shores in tidal waves and wreak all manner of deadly havoc, but Leviathan would have ultimately stayed his hand and sent him back into the trench for another few millennia.

Humanity, though culled, would have survived. Now, they were doomed.

"Can you see your future, Tifa?" he asked her, stripping away the useless, shredded rags of human clothing still clinging to her body.

That sad, blinding, wall she’d encountered on the SS Godo had indeed fallen. Beyond it, she lived endlessly on a planet fully submerged, watching life's evolutionary march begin anew. She and Sefi would swim alongside and above it throughout the eons, guiding it with steadier hands than this dying age had ever known.

Her old audiences were lost to her, but in their stead, she’d teach a reborn world how to sing.

But her transformation had not come without a dire cost: There was no going home, there was no resolution to old conflicts. That life had ended; she was as good as dead to it. Tifa wondered if Sefi could tell she was crying. Could he taste her tears when he breathed the same waters? Did he savor them?

He favored her—she believed that— but he was truly a cruel god.

"I can," she quietly replied and turned to face him. "Let it be fast."

"This world will suffer far less than if you hadn't come to me. I promise," he said. A crooked smirk graced his features. He lightly touched where her cheeks would have been tear-streaked, and answered more plainly, "They will know a moment's fear; pain shall escape them."

Far below, the floor of the Wutai trench gave way, baring the heart of the world for their taking.

Far above, the skies rent, and the stars fell.


End file.
